


I Shall Wear Fire (and be consumed)

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-07 05:21:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/744730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Martha, Rose and Donna: being a companion and a soldier. The Doctor might be done with them, but they are not done with him yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Shall Wear Fire (and be consumed)

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from a [much better poem](http://apiphile.livejournal.com/2702735.html) by [Apiphile](http://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile), which you should totally check out. Also inspired by the song Explosions by Ellie Goulding, which I also very much recommend you check out.

Martha Jones is looking at the sky again: it Milky-Way-swirls above her head, as if promising to come right to her door and take her away with it. She can almost smell it: the kiss of ozone, the fizzle of the world after rain, the burn of a lightning strike, and she can taste it in her mouth, the acrid not-adrenaline of an awful lot of running to do. She can feel a gun on her hip even when it isn't there, and when she sleeps she dreams of exploding stars.

She chose to leave the Doctor but she didn't choose to let the story end; now, on earth and looking above herself, she will write her own story - and, perhaps, find him again, in her own time. The phone in her hip-top pocket that never rings and never needs charging reminds her of that: if she rings, he will come running; if he calls, she will help. He may keep running, he may change his face, but it isn't over; they merely follow different threads in a ball-of-yarn universe. After him, joining UNIT was the obvious choice: now she knows just how much she doesn't know, and knows how to fight to learn it. She is her own person now, in her own story, and although she no longer needs him she still misses him.

So when she hears the sound of space falling in Greenwich, the choice is so obvious she almost has no choice at all: she runs towards the explosion, and she never looks back.

~*~

Rose knows how silly it is, but she still wonders about him, out there in the stars on his own. He left them all in their own happy endings and flew away into time and space without her; without any of them, when he has never liked to chase the universe alone. She has her own life now, her own love now; still, she can't forget him. He showed her how to fight, how to write her own story - taught her that where she was born or where she went to school or how she lived in a council estate didn't have to dictate the plot, not unless she wanted it that way. The first time she met him, she was more scared than she's ever been, and ever since he left her he's been trying to find that kind of scared again, because she'd been slipping into a life with a beginning, middle and end, neat and tidy and _boring_ as any story she wrote for GCSE English Language. Now she runs around her world - and runs it, sort of - chasing all the things that shouldn't be there and fixing things that shouldn't have broken, and it's fun but it's almost domestic: fighting aliens with her man and Sunday night cooked dinners with her mum. She's important and necessary and needed, even though almost no-one knows her name, and that's enough, almost. It's very nearly almost enough, it really is, but still wonders about him, about the man she chose to leave behind. Sometimes she wonders if there aren't two of her, the way there are two of him: one still seeing stars, and one off chasing explosions. She wonders if she's the right her, and if the other him is okay, if he's still the lonely storm or if he has found someone else, some other friend to tell him off and talk him down and remind him he isn't alone.

He taught her how much she didn't know, and how she didn't need to settle for what she didn't know. So when Rose sees the Rift shimmer and haze in front of her, out of bounds in Greenwich, she takes her gun and steps through, to find out what else she hasn't found out yet.

~*~

Donna keeps forgetting things, but she can't remember when she started. She forgets her keys, to feed the cat, to pick up her work pass, but these are all ordinary things, the things everyone forgets every so often. She's forgetting more than that, she knows: she always knows there's something else she should be doing, somewhere else she should be, even though all her agendas and post-it notes and carefully-made colour-coded lists say there is nothing, nothing at all. Even her grandfather, her staunchest supporter, just smiles and tell her that she's fine, she's doing okay, she's brilliant just as she is, when she's sure he used to tell her how much more she could be and she can't remember when he stopped.

It will come back to her, she thinks, and fills her house, her office, her life, with notes and lists and reminders, and spends her nights dreaming in 'something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue'. It will come back to her, she's sure: it has to. In the meantime she works, shops, flirts, fights, and fights the urge to stop and change direction, be somewhere else. Somewhere there's a story that needs finishing, which is just daft: she could never be a writer, she can't even finish _reading_ a novel. And yet. And yet. She has a story to finish, and she should be somewhere else, finishing it. She spends more and more time with her grandfather, looking at the stars like she's getting gossip from old friends, and wondering why they don't seem to comfort Wilf like they used to - like they still comfort her.

(She knows he used to love them, used to smile like a shooting star as the galaxy turned above him, but she can't remember when he stopped.)

She is out Saturday-shopping in Greenwich (third item on today's schedule), when she hears the explosion: it sounds like a star tearing, like the sky falling, like the event she's felt herself getting ready for for months. It sounds, in fact, like the beginning of what she _should_ be doing, and she doesn't even hesitate before dropping her bags and running towards it on her high heels, never looking back.

~*~

They look at the epicentre, all three of them, Martha and Donna and Rose, and then look at each other, black hair and red hair and blonde.

"Did - did _we_ do that?" Rose asks, eyes wide but not scared, and Donna just looks and looks and looks.

(She's seeing old friends: she's where she's meant to be. She remembers _everything_ : all the running, all the everything, all the stars, and she isn't afraid.)

"What _is_ it?" she demands: it's amber, it means get ready. She's been ready for months.

"I don't know," Martha says, mobile phone in her hand and already dialling. "But I'm going to find out."

After all, the Doctor never really said goodbye to any of them, and none of them ever really said goodbye to him. He might _think_ he is done with them - but they are not done with him, not yet.


End file.
